Farther north, theLoon Hot Dog Festival loonmtn.com is held each year in the ski-resort town of Lincoln, N.H. While gondola rides and bungee jumping are part of the amusements, neither sound especially compatible with dog downing.

Even if skiing fills you with abject terror as it does for me, no one should miss a day spent playing in the snow, topped off with ski-resort comfort food, copious restorative beer, and fireside cozying up.

And Juliette, unless you've ever stood on top of a mountain you've climbed however small, or close to a ski-resort you'll never know how satisfying all that messing about with ropes and crampons can be.

That dynamic is evident around this historic mining town of about 1,650, which had long opposed a ski-resort expansion from nearby Mt. Crested Butte to the neighboring national-forest lands of Snodgrass Mountain.

These quandaries are popping up wherever there are sizable woods -- from developing countries with vast tropical rainforests, like Brazil and Indonesia, to sylvan spots like the ski-resort town of Truckee, near Lake Tahoe in California's Sierra Nevada mountains.